TIME TO MOURN; DIVERS RECOVER BODIES OF KENNEDY PLANE VICTIMS.

Byline: Mike Allen The New York Times

On the fifth day of a search that framed a great national wake, a red sonar blotch led searchers to the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his two passengers, entombed in the shattered fuselage of his plane on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Kennedy's remains were located before dawn by an underwater camera checking objects detected by sonar. Several hours later, Navy divers in heavy-duty gear adjusted the crumpled wreckage and found the passengers on his flight through black haze Friday night - his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren G. Bessette.

The three bodies, found at 110 feet, about seven miles off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, were raised at about 4:30 p.m.

Just after noon, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, wearing shorts and looking exhausted, boarded a Coast Guard helicopter at his compound in nearby Hyannis Port and was taken to a Navy salvage ship, the USS Grasp, to witness the recovery. He was accompanied by his sons, Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy Jr.

Sen. Kennedy accompanied the bodies on Wednesday night to the Coast Guard station in the fishing village of Woods Hole at the toe of Cape Cod. Because the deaths were accidental, the bodies were to be autopsied before being turned over to the families.

The water temperature, about 52 degrees, helped preserve the bodies, an investigator said in an interview.

John Kennedy, 38, was piloting a single-engine Piper Saratoga with his wife and sister-in-law aboard when it was lost in the Atlantic on Friday night. He had intended to drop Lauren Bessette off at Martha's Vineyard, then fly on to Hyannis Port for the Saturday wedding of his cousin, Rory Kennedy.

Kennedy family members, anxious to avoid having a spectacle made of John Kennedy's final resting place, are making preparations for him to be buried at sea in a Navy ceremony, according to a family adviser. CNN reported that the ceremony had been planned to take place off a Navy ship this morning.

The family decided after much internal debate to hold an intimate memorial service, which will be closed to the news media. The service will be held at a Roman Catholic Church that Kennedy's late mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, attended, the Church of St. Thomas More in Manhattan. The stone church seats just 350.

The service for Kennedy and his wife will be held Friday at 11 a.m. The White House said President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton will attend.

A candlelight memorial service for Lauren Bessette will be held Saturday at 7 p.m. at Christ Church in Greenwich, Conn.

Capt. Christopher C. Murray, the Navy's superintendent of diving, said in an interview that Kennedy's body was in the largest of several pieces of wreckage found near each other. Murray said the divers made the recovery in difficult conditions; visibility was less than eight feet, the current was strong and the ocean floor was littered with rocks and boulders.

Divers descend

The divers, who descended in elevator cages, were attached to the Grasp by oxygen and radio lines, and other divers stood by on the ship in case one of those beneath got hurt or tangled in the wreckage. Now that the bodies have been removed, divers will use straps and cables to form slings around the pieces of plane before hoisting them on the Grasp's boom, which can lift 40 tons.

Clinton, who has talked continually with Kennedy family members since the plane was reported missing, said on Wednesday he had authorized a continuation of the unusually long search, which has been criticized as excessive for three private citizens.

``Because of the role of the Kennedy family in our national lives and because of the enormous losses that they have sustained in our lifetimes, I thought it was appropriate to give them a few more days,'' Clinton said Wednesday afternoon during a news conference on other topics.

``If anyone believes that was wrong, the Coast Guard is not at fault - I am,'' Clinton said. ``It was because I thought it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.''

According to the official announcement by the National Transportation Safety Board, ``a large portion of the fuselage'' was discovered at about 11:40 p.m. Tuesday.

Kennedy's body was identified within three hours. Then in a 45-minute dive that began just before noon, Navy divers located the other two bodies. On Wednesday afternoon, a second set of divers recovered the bodies.

`Splash point'

The debris field, which investigators call the plane's ``splash point,'' is just off Gay Head, the western tip of Martha's Vineyard, and very near a private beach that was once owned by Mrs. Onassis and now belongs to her last surviving child, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.

Investigators have said Kennedy's plane was plunging at 5,000 feet per minute just before radar contact was lost Friday night, and pilots and aviation authorities said the description that has been provided seems to indicate a ``graveyard spiral,'' a corkscrew descent in which the pilot becomes disoriented and loses control.

The death of Kennedy, who grew up before the nation from a rich scion to a ruggedly glamorous entrepreneur, has provoked an outpouring of mourning and nostalgia for America's best-known political family. As crowds thronged the Kennedys' home in New York and anyplace with a Kennedy connection, the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum, operated by the Hyannis Area Chamber of Commerce, added an easel on Wednesday afternoon featuring a quote from President Kennedy, who was assassinated when his son was 3.

``We are tied to the ocean,'' Kennedy said in 1962 at a dinner celebrating the America's Cup. ``When we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.''

A Navy destroyer, the USS Briscoe, which had been training in the area, moved toward Cape Cod on Wednesday in case the family decides to hold the funeral ceremony at sea. A Navy official said ``commitment at sea,'' as the ceremony is known, is typically performed for active or retired members of the service, and their dependents. But Navy regulations allow for the service to be performed for ``notable service or outstanding contributions to the United States.''

Burial at sea is a ritual that extends back to the ancient Greeks, who dropped a coin in the mouth of the deceased for the toll at the River Styx. Paul L. Stillwell, the director of history at the Naval Institute, a private educational organization, said the service has become more rare now that bodies can be airlifted off ships at sea.

CAPTION(S):

Photo: (1 -- color) Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, center, Patrick Kennedy, left front, and Maxwell Kennedy, far right, accompany a casket carrying one of the victims of the crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law.

David L. Ryan/Boston Globe

(2 -- color) An exhausted diver sits with colleagues in Martha's Vineyard after returning from the site were John Kennedy Jr.'s plane was found.

Matt York/Associated Press

Map: Martha's Vineyard

Associated Press

(3 -- color) John F. Kennedy Jr.

(4 -- color) Carolyn Bessette

(5) Lauren Bessette